Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

You’re on a busy city street in the morning when everyone’s going to work. The sidewalks are filled, people are rushing by. You don’t know what’s in their heads or hearts. You don’t even know what’s in their briefcases. Probably the usual—memos, papers, smartphone, business cards.

Yesterday just after 9 a.m. a young man in his 20s—blue suit, red tie, thick black hair—rushed up the steps of a club on the west side of Manhattan. He looked like any young businessman. His briefcase was slightly larger than most, and made of light aluminum. Inside it was the personal crucifix of St. Thomas More, which he kept beside him on his desk as he wrote, and which is believed to have been with him in the Tower of London while he was imprisoned. The gold crucifix opens up, or rather is split in two, top to bottom, and on the inside of the top part is an authentic relic of St Thomas the Apostle—Doubting Thomas.

So at one point yesterday morning as people rushed by on West 51st Street, carrying their Starbucks and talking on the phone, they were within a few feet of a piece of physical matter that had been part of the body of the Apostle who put his hand in the wounds of Christ.

You never know what’s passing you by.

Also in the briefcase: a relic of Edmund Campion, the brilliant renegade Jesuit who had, during the reign of Elizabeth I, been the pride of the Anglican Church, and who shocked everyone by converting to Catholicism at the least opportune moment, the Reformation. He broke the law to say mass and distribute the sacraments for England’s Catholics. In 1581 he was hunted down, arrested, tried, and, having been found guilty of treason dragged through the streets, hanged, let down alive, disemboweled, drawn and quartered. The crown wanted to scare everyone out of being Catholic, or at least publicly so, and pretty much succeeded for a good long time. But they created a lot of martyrs and some saints, Edmund being one of them. The Campion relic: a small, almost minute piece of cloth from the cloak he wore when, in hiding and on the run, he could no longer dress as a Jesuit.

The relic of St. Thomas the Apostle within the crucifix of St. Thomas More is the property of Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, England. In 1593 the Jesuits of England started a school in France for English boys who could not receive such an education at home. While the purpose of the school was to form their minds and consciences, it increasingly found it had an important second purpose: to rescue and keep safe centuries of English Catholic art, literature and symbols of worship. In 1794, the college moved to Stonyhurst.

They have a lot there—manuscripts, artifacts, vestments. A Book of Hours used by Mary, Queen of Scots, and the chasuble Henry VIII wore to meet the king of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. As the years passed the collection became ecumenical: There’s a brass-and-silver globe signed and dated 1623, Quaim Muhammed, and the Shakespeare First Folio, 1623.

The students at Stonyhurst get to see these things all the time, and if you call and make an appointment you can see them too, but Stonyhurst is now trying to create a new, larger, more modern space to which they can invite more of the public, along with a retreat and study center. Members of the group trying to raise attention and support for the project have been on a swing through Washington, Baltimore, Princeton, Boston and New York, where I saw them and their treasures. There, in a club on West 51st Street, I touched something that Thomas More touched, that may have been on his desk as he wrote “Utopia”; and a relic of Campion, that daredevil; and a relic of Doubting Thomas, Apostle of Jesus. That’s not a bad day, when you can say that.

Tom Clancy was a great gentleman, generous and kind. He gave a lot of money away to medical research, and if you wanted to hear him get excited you talked about what doctors were doing to make the world better. They were his heroes. He loved America and worried about her. Our friendship over the years became an email and instant-message one. I’d be working at my desk and suddenly on my screen his nom de net would pop up and he’d be full of life, immediately present. What’s cooking, how’s the weather, what do you think of this senator, that governor, who’s coming up, who can help the country? He was relaxed about his work, didn’t take it so seriously, or rather himself so seriously. He’d sold tens of millions of books and was a household name. That didn’t impress him much. At the same time he was aware of his name’s power and frequently deployed it to help others.

He was a professional who hit his marks and did his job. He had the confident sense his imagination would carry him through. He did a lot of research, which often involved finding ignored geniuses who loved telling him about the latest in military technology and spycraft and politics. He admired men and women in the armed forces as much as he admired doctors. When he judged a general to be a good man he’d tell you why, and a lot of the time it wasn’t what he’d done on the battlefield but something else. Of a Marine officer, from memory: “This guy was held up outside a Wal-Mart, pushed his wife to safety, clocked the bad guy and sat on him while he waited for the cops.” He admired manliness in all its manifestations. He was especially kind to young writers. In 1989 he heard of a manuscript I’d written, got his hands on it, and tracked me down to offer to write a big, over-the-top blurb. We had never met. I was impressed and heartened by his praise—he knew what young writers need most is to be heartened—and a friendship began. I notice that I begin this by calling Tom a gentleman, and going over old emails I found that that was his highest form of praise. Of an admired surgeon: “He’s a great gentleman and a pretty good chest cutter.” Of another: “A solid troop, Bill is.” He thought character was the most important thing, that it trumped brains and talent in the making of a life.

Tom Clancy loved Camden Yards, the Yeoman Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he was proud to tell me a few years ago he’d bought research chairs in ophthalmology and pediatric oncology, the latter a great passion. Tom’s father had been a mailman there; now Tom was sending notes to Stephen Hawking telling him of the Neurology Department’s latest clinical trials. He found this part of his life delicious—that he had risen so far, just like an American—and common, too. To him, his story was the classic one of his country and the essence of its dream: Here you can start from anywhere and go on to anything. He was proudly sentimental and loved the unheralded—regular, uncelebrated people who yet make everything run, who keep the whole thing going. He had a gift for praise and dwelled on the excellence of others. He noticed it. When someone—a clerk, a president—was a jerk, he summed the person up with an earthy epithet and moved on. Life is too short, let’s talk about the good guys.

But the essence of him was this: Tom Clancy, patriot. Oh how he loved the America he inherited and came from, wanted so badly to preserve and did help preserve, by creating, among others, the brave and good Jack Ryan, a late-20th-century icon of the USA. I called him Big Tom. Probably a number of people who knew him did. He had a big heart. He changed many lives. He worked hard. I hope tonight the Beefeaters of the Yeoman Warders are hoisting a few in his memory. Something tells me they are, right now. Tom Clancy, rest in peace. Read More »

Here’s the Starbucks gun request the company made today. The company, which has some 10,000 stores and 160,000 employees in the U.S., is asking customers who carry handguns in open-carry states to please not bring their guns into the store. It’s hard to believe this will be taken as controversial or as anything other than reasonable, fair and sane, but we are an interesting country.

I spoke to Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz this afternoon, by phone.

Why did you do this? Why does Starbucks have to have a position on people bringing guns in for coffee?

“We are not a policy maker and we’re not on any level anti-gun. But over the past four months there’s been episodes in and around our stores that alarmed us. Advocates on both sides [of the gun debate] began to stage events in and around Starbucks stores that mischaracterized Starbucks’ brand and position. That was not in the interests of our company, our shareholders and employees. So open-carry comes, and we abide by the law. But it began to disturb us, the number of customers and children who became alarmed at seeing people in the store carrying guns. . . . We had a couple situations the past few weeks where some people walked in with rifles! [Some local Starbucks stores] became a staging area for the argument over Second Amendment rights. We’re not pro-gun or anti-gun, and we decided to respectfully ask gun owners to leave their guns out of Starbucks.”

Why did Starbucks become a theater of the gun debate?

“Our stores are a meeting place, coffee’s been part of conversation for hundreds of years” he said. This fact “became a natural opportunity for people to use us as a staging ground.”

How do you imagine this working—how do people who carry guns in open-carry states disarm themselves to get a cup of coffee?

“This decision was made through the lens of our values. . . . It’s not a ban. We’ll serve customers and not ask them to leave. . . . I personally have spent endless hours on this issue. I’ve spoken to passionate advocates on both sides.” He notes that two members of the Starbucks board are former Defense Secretary Bob Gates and former Sen. Bill Bradley. The board voted in support of the request. “We viewed this through the lens of bipartisanship.”

In the old Westerns, sometimes the saloonkeeper told the cowboys and ranchers to hang up their guns on a rack before coming inside and drinking. Did that sort of thing pass through your mind?

Interjection on speakerphone from Schultz’s public relations aide: “Howard’s from Brooklyn.”

Your letter seemed particularly polite and eager to strike a fair minded tone. Did it go through a million drafts?

“No. What I tried to do was go through a lens of fairness.”

Everyone probably asks you if you have guns. Do you have guns?

“I’m not gonna answer it because I don’t think it’s about me.” Read More »

I wrote a blog post a while back about how sometimes after a column goes up a reader writes and states, more succinctly than you had, your essential point. People find the essence of what you’re saying and give it to you more clearly than you’d given it to them. With today’s column a variation on this happened. The answer to a question I’d put forth suddenly became clear to me. The question was: Why would Vladimir Putin take such an aggressive tone in parts of a piece supposedly addressed to Americans and supposedly explaining his views on Syria and, more largely, U.S. foreign policy? Suddenly I realized: because he’s not really writing to America. That’s not who he’s talking to. He chose as a venue a major American newspaper, but he’s writing to the world. He is telling the world he knows how to correct America, tell it off, criticize it for its conceit. And he does it right to their faces, not in a Moscow interview or a St. Petersburg speech. He is rubbing America’s nose in it for the delectation of its friends, occasional friends, foes and occasional foes. He wasn’t writing to us at all. He’s attempting to show the world he’s its reliable voice, its real leader, not those other guys. Would he have done this in the past? No. A truly historic level of foreign policy incompetence on the part of the White House got us to this point. Read More »

He should have canceled the speech. It was halfhearted, pro forma and strange. It added nothing, did not deepen or advance the story, was not equal to the atmosphere surrounding it, and gave no arguments John Kerry hasn’t made, often more forcefully, in the past 10 days.

It was a time filler: The White House had asked for the time and had to fill it. But at this point in the president’s Syria drama an indifferent piece of work only underscores the overall impression that things just aren’t working that well in the White House.

It is hard to believe a lot of people watched. It’s hard to believe hearts were changed.

I was afraid he was going to do “foaming at the mouth”, “blood and hair,” “gasping for breath” and “writhing in pain.” Presidents shouldn’t say words and phrases like that. He should have referred listeners and viewers to the easily available and highly graphic documentation of the attacks, and simply characterized them as the painful thing they are. You’re trying to influence and persuade, you’re not trying to make people lean away, or remind them that repeats of “Law & Order SVU” are on Channel 47.

Another problem, and there’s no nice way to say this: It is hard to believe such a chill man has such warm feelings about the sad end of strangers far away. I think this has been one of his big unspoken problems in the selling of his Syria policy. It is based to some degree on his emotional indignation, and it is not fully credible because it’s hard to believe he’s so moved.

On the policy: A problem with the limited, targeted strike or strikes that he speaks of is that nobody knows—literally, nobody knows—exactly how strong Bashar Assad is. Nobody knows what position he is really in. A man who uses weapons of mass destruction may simply be a monster. On the other hand he may be a monster who has reason to fear he’s losing. He may be a vulnerable monster. And a targeted strike not meant to take him out, may take him out. Which will summon a new version of hell.

The president is looking into Russia’s recent proposal, which is among recent “encouraging signs” that have “potential.”

They ought to go back to giving major addresses in the Oval Office, because it has a mystique and stature that it lends to those who sit at the big desk. The president’s staffers apparently think the Oval is tired, or insufficiently groovy, or something. They have him stand at a podium and talk into an empty room under Bela Lugosi lighting. The groovelocity of this choice is lost on me. Read More »

The president has backed away from a military strike in Syria. But he can’t acknowledge this or act as if it is true. He is acting and talking as if he’s coolly, analytically, even warily contemplating the Russian proposal and the Syrian response. The proposal, he must know, is absurd. Bashar Assad isn’t going to give up all his hidden weapons in wartime, in the middle of a conflict so bitter and severe that his forces this morning reportedly bombed parts of Damascus, the city in which he lives. In such conditions his weapons could not be fully accounted for, packed up, transported or relinquished, even if he wanted to. But it will take time—weeks, months—for the absurdity to become obvious. And it is time the president wants. Because with time, with a series of statements, negotiations, ultimatums, promises and proposals, the Syria crisis can pass. It can dissipate into the air, like gas.

The president will keep the possibility of force on the table, but really he’s lunging for a lifeline he was lucky to be thrown.

Why is he backing off? Because he knows he doesn’t have the American people and isn’t going to get them. The polls, embarrassingly, show the more people hear the less they support it. The president’s problem with his own base was probably startling to him, and sobering. He knows he was going to lose Congress, not only the House but very possibly—likely, I’d say—the Senate. The momentum was all against him. And he never solved—it was not solvable—his own Goldilocks problem: A strike too small is an embarrassment, a strike too big could topple the Assad regime and leave Obama responsible for a complete and cutthroat civil war involving terrorists, foreign operatives, nihilists, jihadists, underemployed young men, and some really nice, smart people. Obama didn’t want to own that, or the fires that could engulf the region once Syria went up.

His plan was never good. The choices were never good. In any case he was going to lose either in terms of domestic prestige, the foreign result or both. Likely both.

He got himself into it and now Vladimir Putin, who opposes U.S. policy in Syria and repeatedly opposed a strike, is getting him out. This would be coldly satisfying for Putin and no doubt personally galling for Obama—another reason he can’t look as if he’s lunging.

A serious foreign-policy intellectual said recently that Putin’s problem is that he’s a Russian leader in search of a Nixon, a U.S. president he can really negotiate with, a stone player who can talk grand strategy and the needs of his nation, someone with whom he can thrash it through and work it out. Instead he has Obama, a self-besotted charismatic who can’t tell the difference between showbiz and strategy, and who enjoys unburdening himself of moral insights to his peers.

But Putin has no reason to want a Syrian conflagration. He is perhaps amused to have a stray comment by John Kerry be the basis for a resolution of the crisis. The hidden rebuke: It means that when Putin met with Obama at the G-20 last week Obama, due to his lack of competence, got nothing. But a stray comment by the Secretary of State? Sure, why not rub Obama’s face in it.

* * *

All this, if it is roughly correct, is going to make the president’s speech tonight quite remarkable. It will be a White House address in which a president argues for an endeavor he is abandoning. It will be a president appealing for public support for an action he intends not to take.

We’ve never had a presidential speech like that!

So what will he say? Some guesses.

He will not really be trying to “convince the public.” He will be trying to move the needle a little, which will comfort those who want to say he retains a matchless ability to move the masses. It will make him feel better. And it will send the world the message: Hey, this isn’t a complete disaster. The U.S. president still has some juice, and that juice can still allow him to surprise you, so watch it.

He will attempt to be morally compelling and rhetorically memorable. He will probably, like Susan Rice yesterday, attempt to paint a graphic portrait of what chemical weapons do—the children in their shrouds, the suffering parents, what such deaths look like and are. This is not meaningless: the world must be reminded what weapons of mass destruction are, and what the indifference of the world foretells.

He will claim the moral high ground. He will temporarily reserve the use of force… Read More »

This is the reason many people don’t like ObamaCare. It’s also part of why people wind up making fun of the president at state fairs. (On that, everyone should breathe deep and remember, as the noted political philosopher Orson Welles once put it: “It’s the business of the American people to take the mickey out of the president.” It’s not only what we do, it’s what we should do. Welles was speaking on a talk show; it was the 1970s; he was talking about people making fun of some Republican president, Nixon or Ford. So what? They can take it. And they’re not kings. Let me suggest a classy Obama move that might go over well. From his Vineyard vacation spot he should have the press office issue a release saying his reaction to finding out a rodeo clown was rudely spoofing him, was, “So what?” Say he loves free speech, including inevitably derision directed at him, and he does not wish for the Missouri state fair to fire the guy, and hopes those politicians (unctuously, excessively, embarrassingly) damning the clown and the crowd would pipe down and relax. This would be graceful and nice, wouldn’t it? He would never do it. He gives every sign of being a person who really believes he shouldn’t be made fun of, and if he is it’s probably racially toned, because why else would you make fun of him?

But back to health care. The piece I linked to, by Yuxing Zheng of the Oregonian, makes quick work of a complicated subject. A woman in Cornelius, Ore., takes care of her disabled 22-year-old daughter. The daughter has cerebral palsy, spina bifida and a condition called automonic dysreflexia. She requires 24-hour care. The mother provides it, receiving for this $1,400 a month. The mother fears—and is apparently right to fear—a provision of the Affordable Care Act that will, as Zheng reports, “largely prohibit guardians from serving as the paid caregiver of an adult child with developmental disabilities.” The mother is afraid this will mean foster care for her daughter, or a lengthy and costly process in which she herself will be forced to transfer legal guardianship to someone else. The provision, the paper says, will likely cause hardship for hundreds of Oregon families in which the guardian and the caregiver are the same person.

Oregon officials are asking the administration for an exemption to the provision.

Four points. First, no mother or child should be put in this position by a government ostensibly trying to improve their lives. Second, everyone in America knows health care is a complicated and complex subject, that a national bill will have 10 million moving parts, and that when a government far away—that would be Washington, D.C.—decides to take greater control of the nation’s health care it will likely get many, maybe a majority, of the moving parts wrong. A bill that is passed and is meant to do A will become Law U—a law of unforeseen, unplanned and unexpected consequences. And that’s giving Washington the benefit of the doubt, and assuming they really meant to honestly produce Law A. Third, because health-care legislation is so complex, it is almost impossible for people to understand it, to get their arms around what may be a given bill’s inadequacies and structural flaws. Stories of those inadequacies and flaws dribble out day by day, in stories like this one. They produce a large negative blur, and a feeling of public anxiety: What will we find out tomorrow? The administration reacts, as the president has, with protestations about how every large, life-enhancing bill has hitches and bumps along the way. But this thing looks now like one large hitch, one big and never ending bump. Fourth, when a thousand things have to be changed about a law to make it workable, some politician is going to stand up and say: “This was a noble effort in the right direction but let’s do the right thing and simplify everything, with a transparent and understandable plan: single payer.” Will that be Mrs. Clinton’s theme in 2016? Read More »

So the controversy over NBC doing a drama about Hillary Clinton: How will they play it? How will they draw her? It’s hard to believe they’d do bald propaganda but hard to believe they won’t. NBC is a cultural entity of the left, or you might say the soft left. She is a political figure of the left, or you might say the soft left.

I sense synergy

Actually I sense botch. It will be a drama about Hillary’s wonderfulness and when it’s done they’ll privately screen it and an executive will say, “We’re going to be accused of liberal bias, we’d better balance it a little.” So they’ll reshoot some scenes and insert things that might make Hillary look bad, but they’ll choose the wrong things, stupid things, and it will make the whole effort look cheesy. Even with Diane Lane. Who’s a ridiculous choice, but so what?

Let’s amuse ourselves by imagining what the movie will look like.

I’ll go first.

The dramatic template they’ll use is the life of Eleanor Roosevelt: Ugly duckling suffers much, finds her voice, leads. By the end she has become a thing of beauty, a real presence in the national life, a voice for the forgotten.

Quick opening:

Born in solid-burgher Illinois, baby boomer, father a small-business owner, a harried bully. She is propelled and protected by her mother, who carries with her competence, gruff affection and a quiet sense of grievance: Her own potential has been unexplored. “You have to be strong,” Mrs. Rodham tells her daughter. She gives 7-year-old Hillary a children’s book about a little girl who faces down some local toughs and protects an abused dog. It all takes place in a little town called Whitehaven.

She is an awkward teenager, can’t seem to get right what the other girls get so easily—the right headband, how to flirt. Scene: suburban basement party, 1963. The other girls dance to the Shirelles. Hillary, in a sad little flowered cotton dress, sits on a folding chair to the side. Next to her is a shy boy with a shirt-pocket pen protector. They silently watch, then talk about homework.

She attempts to win her Republican father’s approval, becomes a Goldwater girl. It doesn’t work. He still criticizes her almost-perfect report cards. “Don’t they give A-pluses at your school?”

She leaves home, goes to Wellesley, begins to study politics more seriously. Reading great texts, taking notes. Scene: Hillary in flared jeans, book in hand, running breathlessly down a dormitory corridor. She comes upon another student. “Listen to this, listen,” she says. “The working poor, especially those who are members of minority groups, are discriminated during the mortgage loan process at banks—especially women, who can’t even get a loan unless a man co-signs for it.” The other student, a blank beauty, toothbrush in mouth, towel on freshly shampooed hair, stares at her, blankly. “Um, wow,” she says. Hillary insists, “We’ve got to do something about it!” and marches on. Another student pokes her head from a room, makes eye contact with towel girl, and they start to laugh. Rodham comes on a little strong.

Moment of triumph: senior class address on graduation day. Hillary challenges the establishment, the entrenched powers. “We need more ecstatic modes of being.” It doesn’t make complete sense, but it’s the ’60s and nothing has to. In the audience, a mortified U.S. senator who’d come to speak at commencement. Hillary sees him squirm. We see on her face this thought: This thing I’m part of has power. The young have more power than we know.

Yale Law school, long nights in the library. She meets Bill—charistmatic, friendly, ambitious. This one knows how to dance the mashed potato and the Loco-Motion too. “In Arkansas we grow watermelons the size of Saturnian moons!” Dates, movies, love. His mother, Virgina Kelley—antic, Southern white working class—doesn’t like her a bit. “She isn’t good enough, not your type—she doesn’t even wear mascara.” Bill holds firm: She is the partner I need for my journey.

Marriage. Elections. First lady of Arkansas. Awkward. What is the line between feminist seriousness and movement priggishness? Where is the line between getting power and staying human? She wants to be serious and she wants, as always, to fit in. Intermittent mascara use. Comic scene: Virginia gives her makeup lessons. Hillary walks out looking like a whore. But she’s learned something from their recently begun conversations: it’s a mistake to think you have nothing to learn from the Virginia Kelleys of the world. They know things they don’t teach in the Ivy League.

Thrown out of office, back in office, baby Chelsea, inexorable rise. Rumors about Bill and women, works through it. Growing friendships with Democratic activists, movers and shakers, moneymen, pollsters. A new interest in children’s issues. Lucrative board memberships. She will fight the power from the inside. The shoulders of her power suit get bigger.

They’re speaking of Bill for president in 1992. Why not? It will position him for the future. But no one can… Read More »

I can’t shake my dismay at Gov. Chris Christie’s comments, 12 days ago, on those who question and challenge what we know or think we do of the American national security state.

Speaking at an Aspen Institute gathering attended by major Republican Party donors, a venue at which you really don’t want to make news, Christie jumped at the chance to speak on the tension between civil liberties and government surveillance. He apparently doesn’t see any tension.

Christie doesn’t like seeing the nature and extent of government surveillance being questioned or doubted. He doesn’t like “this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now.” In fact, it reflects “a very dangerous thought.” He said: “These esoteric, intellectual debates—I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation.” Those who challenge surveillance programs may come to regret it: “The next attack that comes, that kills thousands of Americans as a result, people are going to be looking back on the people having this intellectual debate and wondering whether they put—” Here, according to Jonathan Martin’s report in the New York Times, Christie cut himself off.

The audience—again, including GOP moneymen, at the tony Aspen Institute—was, according to Martin, enthralled. They loved it.

Libertarians and many others did not. I did not.

Stipulated: Christie was speaking off the cuff, not in a prepared address that had been thought through but in Q&A in front of a supportive audience. Politicians can get goosey in circumstances like that.

But Christie seized on the topic, as Martin noted, addressed it colorfully and bluntly, and knew what he thought. And in the days since he hasn’t walked it back.

So you have to take seriously what he said.

To call growing concerns about the size, depth, history, ways and operations of our now-huge national-security operation “esoteric” or merely abstract is, simply, absurd. Our federal government is involved in massive data collection that apparently includes a database of almost every phone call made in the U.S. The adequacy of oversight for this system is at best unclear. The courts involved are shadowed in secrecy and controversy. Is it really wrong or foolhardy or unacceptably thoughtful to wonder if the surveillance apparatus is excessive, or will be abused, or will erode, or perhaps in time end, any expectation of communications privacy held by honest citizens?

It is not. These are right and appropriate concerns, very American ones.

Consider just two stories from the past few days. The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Valentino-Devries and Danny Yadron had a stunning piece Friday that touches on the technological aspect of what our government can now do. The FBI is able to remotely activate microphone on phones running Android software. They can now record conversations in this way. They can do the same with microphones in laptops. They can get to you in a lot of ways! Does this make you nervous? If not, why not?

Reuters has a piece just today reporting that data gathered by the National Security Agency has been shared with the Drug Enforcement Administration. The agency that is supposed to be in charge of counterterrorism is sharing data with an agency working in the area of domestic criminal investigations.

Luckily Lois Lerner is on leave, so the IRS isn’t involved yet.

The concerns of normal Americans about the new world we’re entering—the world where Big Brother seems inexorably to be coming to life and we are all, at least potentially Winston Smith—is not only legitimate, it is wise and historically grounded.

And these concerns are not confined to a group of abstract intellectuals debating how many pixels can dance on the head of a pin. Gallup in June had a majority of Americans, 53%, disapproving of NSA surveillance programs, with only 37% approving of the NSA’s efforts to “compile telephone call logs and Internet communications.” And the poll found the most intense opposition to the programs coming from Republicans, who disapproved by almost 2 to 1.

Rasmussen, at roughly the same time, asked the following question: “The government has been secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans for national security purposes regardless of whether there is any suspicion of wrongdoing. Do you favor or oppose the government’s secret collecting of these phone records?” Fifty-nine percent of respondents opposed the collecting telephone records of individuals not suspected of doing anything wrong.

A Fox News poll had 61% disapproving how the administration “is handling the government’s classified surveillance program that collects the phone and Internet records of U.S. citizens.”

So Christie is wrong that concerns and reservations about surveillance are the province of intellectuals and theorists—they’re not. He’s wrong that their concerns are merely abstract—they’re concrete. Americans don’t want to be listened in to, and they don’t want their emails read by strangers, especially the government. His stand isn’t even politically shrewd—it needlessly offends sincere skeptics and isn’t the position of the majority of his party, I suppose with the exception of big ticket donors in Aspen.

Point one: Daniel Ellsberg yesterday in the Washington Post, in a piece on the Snowden case, referred to what might, surprisingly, be called the more easygoing legal climate of 1971, when he gave the Pentagon papers to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. For 13 days, while he distributed copies, he was in hiding, the last few as “a fugitive from justice.” He surrendered himself in Boston and was released the same day on personal-recognizance bond. Later, as charges against him mounted, his bond was increased to $50,000. But for the next two years, under indictment and awaiting trial, he was able to go wherever he liked. “I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures.” That isn’t the kind of treatment Edward Snowden would receive, he said, or Bradley Manning has received.

Ellsberg misses that “different America”: “There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal.”

Ellsberg didn’t go into the criminal actions taken against him. The domestic side of Richard Nixon’s White House, from policy to politics, had the aspects of a kind of malevolent screwball comedy. In August 1971, aides to Nixon discussed a covert operation to get damaging information on Ellsberg from his psychiatrist. The following month they burgled the office of Lewis Fielding. They didn’t find anything.

Ellsberg went on trial in early 1973, charged with theft of classified documents, conspiracy, and other charges related to espionage. During the trial the break-in of Dr. Fielding’s office was revealed. So was evidence that Ellsberg had been wiretapped without a court order. His defense team, learning all this for the first time, was incensed, and the judge himself either felt or imitated umbrage. The government’s actions, he said, “offend a sense of justice.” The events surrounding the case were “bizarre” and had “incurably infected the prosecution of this case.”

He then dismissed all charges against Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower.

* * *

Point two, the other whistleblower case that came to light Sunday. It came from Foreign Policy magazine’s online news site, The Cable, which noted that the office of a law firm that represents State Department whistleblower Aurelia Fedenisn had been broken into. Citing the reporting of a local Fox TV affiliate in Dallas, The Cable said the burglars took three computers and broke into a locked metal filing cabinet. Other items of value—silver bars, electronic and video equipment—were left untouched. KDFW aired video footage from a security camera showing two people, a man and a woman, entering the office building in which the law firm, Schulman & Mathias, is located.

Cary Schulman, Fedenisn’s lawyer, told The Cable: “It’s a crazy, strange and suspicious situation.” He said he thinks whoever broke in was “somebody looking for information and not money.” His most “high-profile case” is Fedenisn’s, and he couldn’t think of “any other case where someone would go to these threat lengths to get our information.”

So what did whitleblower Aurelia Fedenisn blow the whistle on?

She is a former investigator in the Inspector General’s office in the State Department. Agents for the department had been working on investigations that uncovered serious and criminal wrongdoing. Their work, they said, was subject to influence and manipulation by higher-ups at the department. Agents told the IG’s office they were told to stop investigating a U.S. ambassador in a sensitive post who solicited prostitutes in a public park. Fedenisn, a 26 year veteran at State, went public. John Miller of CBS News broke the story on June 11.

Schulman says that since Fedenisn blew the whistle, she has been subject to attempts at intimidation. “They had law-enforcement officers camp out in front of her house, harass her children, and attempt to incriminate herself,” he said.

After the Miller story, State Department spokesman Jen Psaki denied the department was doing anything wrong.

Tuesday, in a telephone interview, Schulman told me the break-in was “odd—curious.” Adding to the strangeness, the burglars seem to have come not once but three separate times over the weekend of June 28-30. That’s “high risk behavior for a burglar,” he said. “I have never seen a commercial burglary where they come back multiple times.”

The burglars took three Apple computers, forced open a locked metal file cabinet, and took one credit card, leaving others behind.

The burglary has been reported to local police and the FBI.

Maybe it was just a third-rate if highly original burglary. Maybe it was related somehow to another case, though Schulman says he can’t think what that case might be.

* * *

Still, the Nixon-era whistleblower whose psychiatrist’s office was broken into has some tough words, in an op-ed piece, for the current administration—just as word comes… Read More »

About Peggy Noonan's Blog

Peggy Noonan is a writer. For twelve years she has been a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of eight books on American politics, history and culture. She was a special assistant to president Ronald Reagan, and before that was a producer and writer at CBS News in New York.